"Interior Secretary Ken Salazar  issued revised rules on Monday for a six-month moratorium on deepwater oil  drilling in the Gulf of Mexico, replacing an earlier one that had been declared invalid by federal courts."

"The waters in Puget Sound's main basin are acidifying as fast as those along the Washington Coast, where wild oysters have not reproduced since 2005."

"Companies with a financial interest in a weed-killer sometimes found in drinking water paid for thousands of studies federal regulators are using to assess the herbicide’s health risks, records  of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency show. Many of these industry-funded studies, which largely support atrazine’s safety, have never been published or subjected to an independent scientific peer review."

"U.S. EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson on Wednesday declared the entire concrete-lined Los Angeles River channel 'traditional navigable waters,' a designation crucial to applying Clean Water Act protections throughout its 834-square-mile urban watershed."

"New Orleans, which managed to escape the oil from the BP spill for more than two months, can't hide any longer. For the first time since the accident, oil from the ruptured well is seeping into Lake Pontchartrain."

"La Nina is likely to cool the tropical Pacific in coming months, a phenomenon which usually causes stronger monsoons across Asia and eastern Australia, the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) said on Tuesday."

Just as harmful to the Gulf of Mexico as the BP oil spill is the annual "dead zone" whose increase in recent years has been driven by nitrogen fertilizer used to produce corn ethanol in the U.S. heartland.

"More than 27,000 abandoned oil and gas wells lurk in the hard rock beneath the Gulf of Mexico, an environmental minefield that has been ignored for decades. No one — not industry, not government — is checking to see if they are leaking, an Associated Press investigation shows."

"The first round of government tests of the chemical dispersants that are being used to break up the massive oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico found they aren't overly damaging to shrimp and small fish, but more tests are needed to determine what happens when they're mixed with oil."

People on the Monterey Peninsula face rising water bills as the California state water board forces their supplier to turn to desalination.

"About 50,000 sea turtle eggs from beaches in the Florida Panhandle and Alabama will be dug up and moved to Florida's Atlantic Coast in hopes of keeping the hatchlings alive in the face of the massive Gulf of Mexico oil spill."

"Compounds associated with neurological problems, cancer and other serious health effects are among the chemicals being used to drill natural gas wells in Pennsylvania, although state and industry officials said Monday the practice is not polluting drinking water."

"Sperm whales feeding even in the most remote reaches of Earth's oceans have built up stunningly high levels of toxic and heavy metals, according to American scientists who say the findings spell danger not only for marine life but for the millions of humans who depend on seafood."

"Three years of talks aimed at reducing whaling activity by Japan, Norway and Iceland broke down Wednesday, leaving management of the population of the world's largest animals essentially in the hands of whale hunters."

"As much as 1 million times the normal level of methane gas has been found in some regions near the Gulf of Mexico oil spill, enough to potentially deplete oxygen and create a dead zone, U.S. scientists said on Tuesday."